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It was only a matter of time before the U.S. Supreme Court's
campaign finance opinions (and decisions at the trial and appellate
level that have applied them to other situations) would be used to
argue that conduct prohibited or limited by government ethics
provisions are also protected as free speech by the First Amendment
of the U.S. Constitution.

In August 2015, a complaint against the state legislative ethics
commission (attached; see below) was filed in the Eastern District
of...

Many local government attorneys insist that government ethics laws should not apply to them because they are covered by legal ethics rules. In fact, some government ethics codes have express exceptions for attorneys. I have always insisted that the two are very separate and should not be confused with each other. A recent Ohio Board of Professional...

Eula Biss's excellent book On
Immunity (Graywolf Press, 2014) is not about legislative
immunity, but about immunity to diseases. And yet there is a great
deal of food for thought in it about municipal ethics.

The first parallel can be seen in the "mun" in both "immunity" and "municipal." It comes
from the same Latin word "munus," which means service or duty. Who
knew that...

What are the government ethics implications of private security when
it goes beyond protecting specific businesses, malls, universities,
and gated communities, becomes an adjunct to or replacement of
an ordinary police force, and is done in conjunction with the public
police force and, often, using off-duty public police officers?

Favoritism
One problem is that such private forces generally protect the most
wealthy neighborhoods. Setting up a neighborhood force with the...

Conflicts of interest are generally not seen to apply to local party
committees. There are almost never limitations on membership or voting on such
committees by local government employees, contractors, developers,
grantees, or others seeking financial benefits from the government.

Robert E. Goodin's book Manipulatory
Politics (Yale Univ. Press, 1980) is valuable for its
"cataloguing [of] various modes of political manipulation," as the
author wrote in his Preface. Goodin found only a few of the cases
"ethically worrisome," but the fact that I disagree does not make
the catalog any less valuable.